Blake Slonecker’s New York Times crossword #1102—Eric’s review
NYT Solution 11-2-24
If you were hoping for a challenging Saturday puzzle after a fun but easy Friday, I hope you weren’t disappointed. This one definitely fell on the easy end of the scale, despite my taking a bunch of false steps along the way.
There are six grid-spanning answers, all of them pretty nice in different ways:
- 17A [Sub’s reference] CLASSROOM ROSTER
- 32A [They’re not afraid to take charge] FEARLESS LEADERS
- 48A [Spin right round] ROTATE CLOCKWISE
- 3D [Andrés Segovia won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for it] CLASSICAL GUITAR
- 8D [Kitchen flippers] SLOTTED SPATULAS
- 12D [Juicy stuff] INTIMATE DETAILS
ROTATE CLOCKWISE is the only one of those answers to have been in a previous NYT crossword. With two other NYT debut answers (35A [Media-based learning sites, informally] AV LABS and 7D [P, B, D, T, K and G] PLOSIVES), the grid felt very fresh.
I put in CLASSICAL GUITAR almost immediately, but then wondered if it was really that simple. But then I realized that 1A [Early electric lights] could be CARBON ARCS (I’d earlier tried ARC LIGHTS, which obviously didn’t fit).
Until I had a few crosses for PLOSIVES, I thought the letters in the clue were atomic symbols. And I blanked for a few minutes on the word SPATULA (and now I’m blanking on the new-to-me word I encountered a few days ago that means the inability to remember a word or name).
Joel Fagliano and his team made it a bit easy with 45A [Record company behind (and inside) Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play”] EMI. (Isn’t a three-letter British record label always EMI, at least in a crossword?
There’s a nice bit of misdirection with 28D [Certain Thanksgiving dish] BOAT. (Admit it: You wanted YAMS or CORN or something similar, right?)